California, September 27, 2017: We all can understand the aggravation of being unable to convey our thoughts on Twitter, courtesy its 140 character-constraint. However, in an astonishing move, Twitter has decided to increase the character limit on tweets to enable its users to convey more information and meaning.

The micro-blogging site that previously allowed users to tweet using 140 characters will now allow them to convey meaning in a whopping 280 characters- double the previous limit.

“This is a small change, but a big move for us”, believes the chief executive of Twitter, Jack Dorsey.

This is a small change, but a big move for us. 140 was an arbitrary choice based on the 160 character SMS limit. Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence! https://t.co/TuHj51MsTu

The decision came following a research previously carried out by Twitter that revealed that double the amount of information per character could be in conveyed in a variety of languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean than what users could in English, Spanish or French among others. This was a growing cause of frustration among Twitter users from the latter language clusters.

The research thus led to the decision to roll out this new attribute.

However, not every Twitter user will be able to avail this service just yet. Twitter is currently testing the new attribute only with a small division of its 328 million clients before choosing whether to dispatch the feature for everybody.

As soon as the social media giant made their formal announcement about the 280 character expansion on September 26, internet reactions were swift and mostly negative, questioning the irrelevant character change.

This is how Twitterati reacted to the latest change,

No need of #280characters please. If you want to write eassy, go to Facebook or blogger. Short is classy and beauty of Twitter.

While users have been increasingly questioning the new move and calling it ‘unnecessary’, the official announcement from Twitter accepted that the new 280-character move is only aimed at creating a more inclusive and equal platform for users of different languages. The announcement also reiterated that Twitter is synonymous with brevity and “that is something we will never change.”

Over the past years, users have been witnessing multiple changes in Twitter’s 140-character constraint. In a previous move earlier this year, the micro-blogging site had removed @ replies from its limits and exempted photos, videos and quotes. This new move is now being hailed as another exemption of the character restrictions.

Twitter has launched “premium full-archive search endpoint”, a premium product for developers that will provide them access to the full Twitter archive, including the first tweet from its CEO Jack Dorsey in 2016.

Starting Friday, the full archive search endpoint is available in beta for the developers’ community.

Twitter is a social micro-blogging site. Wikimedia Commons

This is the first time that this data is available outside of site’s enterprise application programming interface (API), the company said in a statement.

“Like the premium 30-day search endpoint, we want to give you greater access to Twitter history, and we want to make it easy to innovate and to grow your solution,” the micro-blogging platform added.

This will help Twitter build business with developers and vice-versa. VOA

The “premium APIs” can serve as “standard (free and public) APIs” that provide basic query functionality and foundational access to Twitter data and “enterprise APIs” (subscription-based), which deliver real-time and historical data to power businesses at scale. IANS